Maggie's centers (to date, 21 centers of this network have been opened at British and foreign hospitals with a large oncology department) provide patients and their loved ones with all kinds of support, complementing the treatment itself: there you can get advice from a psychologist, nutritionist, etc., do gymnastics, read special literature, chat with other visitors, or just relax and have tea. These institutions are created and operate entirely at the expense of benefactors. Since the origin of this program was Maggie Kezwick-Jenks, a landscape architect and wife of Charles Jenks, who died of cancer, her numerous friends-architects, including Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, took part in bringing her plan to life. Over time, other designers have joined them, but Maggie Centers remain an exemplary customer, always striving for high quality architecture.
One of the reasons is in the very idea of the centers: they should be attractive and comfortable spaces where one could take a break from cold and unpleasant hospital rooms and hide from the outside world in general. At the same time, they are almost always thoughtfully landscaped so that visitors can relax in contact with nature, despite the fact that the plots for their construction are very often extremely unsuccessful: cramped pieces of land next to huge hospital buildings, usually in the city center.
In Oldham, Maggie's Center got a kind of courtyard, sandwiched between not multi-storey, but still large buildings. In order not to end up in a stone bag, the building is raised 4 meters above the ground on slender supports, so the city roofs and peaks of the Pennines in the distance are visible from the windows. Around and under the volume of the building is a garden (including a greenhouse, where you can relax among the greenery in winter), and birches even penetrate the interior - through a glazed light well in the center. The result is a kind of "tree house", where one gets through the bridge, and the similarity enhances the use of wood as a building material, and an innovative one. The Oldham Center is the world's first cross-laminated hardwood building (typically “soft” grades for CLT). dRMM, known for their interest in wood, have already experimented with this particular material in the creation of large art objects, and now they have reached the next level. The North American tree Liriodendron tulip was chosen for the project, a widespread and inexpensive species commonly used for furniture, etc. It is the beauty and strength of such wood (it is three times stronger than pine, while it has a low weight) that made it the best option for a project, taking into account also a modest budget.
The facades of the center are sheathed with thermally treated wood of the same liriodendron: its grooves make it look like a curtain - a similar one is used in the interior of a free plan to create closed zones if necessary. Furniture and wall and ceiling cladding are also made of liriodendron, only for some components such as window frames other species are used.
The architects have thought through all the details to the smallest detail, including the use of wooden door handles, because metal can be unpleasant for chemotherapy patients who develop neuropathy, or moderate use of sunlight, to which radiation therapy is very sensitive.
